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[AceSV]

Aboveground farming is fun.  Part of the reason it's fun is because you can have so many crops to choose from, compared to underground  farming where you get the same 6 crops in every game in every eco-system.  It would be cooler if you could discover new underground crops as you start exploring the caverns. 

One of the things that annoys me about underground farming compared to aboveground farming is that due to the seasonal nature of pigtails, it's difficult to get a constant, trade-able textile industry set up.  But if you have access to aboveground crops like cotton, jute, ramie or hemp (woo), a meager farmland will have you swimming in cloth.  This is doubling annoying because an underground crop really should not be affected by seasons, while an aboveground crop really should. 

So ideas for rare underground crops include:
Textile crops that grow year-round
Textile crops that grow during the seasons that pigtails don't grow
More die colors
High quality crops that grow during only one season.  (note that this would also make them hard to find, since you'd have to gather plants during the right season)
Poison plants (if extracting poison ever becomes useful)
Plants that can only be turned into booze, but make the best booze
Plants that have to be cooked to be edible, but taste delicious
Plants that produce odd substances, like wood, wax, gems, tallow, leather, cheese, resin or rubber. 

[BesorgterZwerg]

I really like your ideas 

[Vattic]

I'd imagine all the new aboveground crops will eventually only grow in specific seasons realistically.

The underground plants will eventually be procedurally generated. Hopefully some with the ideas you suggest.

Edit to add a relevant quote now I've found it:

Now that we have real world fruits, etc, what will happen to the other ones (aside from the underground crops) which were basically analogs to real world crops? Like will bloated tubers become potatoes or something?

That's an open question.  My thought was to scrap them, since the real-world ones are more interesting and I want to use that stronger diverse base of mechanics and potential mechanics as a place to generate random ones from eventually.  Generated plants can have more intricate ties to generated mythology than the made-up plants without constraining the game, I think, and it allows for more possibilities (and our made-up plants are crappy enough that they could all have easily been generated without decreasing the quality at all...).

All the same, they could end up dying a slow lingering death instead, and some might survive indefinitely.

From this post.

I'm sure more has been said, but I can't find it.

[AceSV]

Ooooooh, I love procedural generation.  That would be awesome to get to explore a bunch of crazy new plants every time. 

It might be easier to decide the seasonalness of aboveground crops by giving them ideal temperature and moisture levels instead of picking a season.  This would impact how the plant grows in other biomes too, for example, cotton might grow year-round in the jungle, but only during summer in a temperate grassland. 

[Sefzaps]

Maybe it could procedurally generate syndrome plants? It'd be really fun if said plant is also possible to make clothing out of. Comfy fabric to go with heavy bleeding and numbness.

[Zammer990]

numbness.

Well, I know what my military is wearing from now on...

...sans the bleeding hopefully

[pieceoftheuniverse]

Ooooooh, I love procedural generation.  That would be awesome to get to explore a bunch of crazy new plants every time. 

Until Toady implements the random plant generation, you can do it yourself through mods.

The python script linked to above will create a file with a bunch of plants with randomized names and effects. Strip out the trees (they don't work since the change to multi-tile), and get a whole new selection of crops.